Nathan Marsh Pusey: an appreciation

Modern Age, Summer, 2004 by Brian Domitrovic

NATHAN MARSH PUSEY, who died in November 2001, led Harvard University during one of its most illustrious periods--the 1950s and 1960s. In Harvard lore, the official "golden age" of the university was the latter half of the presidency of Charles William Eliot, the Gay 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, culminating in the legendary class of 1910, which counted among its members two future Nobel Prize winners, including T.S. Eliot. (1) It is important to recognize the 1950s and 1960s as a second golden age for the school, however, a unique chapter in the history of American higher education, when a top university clearly understood and dutifully fulfilled its mission to acquire, deposit, and propagate genuine knowledge. It is important to do so, in the first place, to appreciate the accomplishment of Nathan Pusey, and in the second place, to come to terms with the loss that resulted from the student agitations at Harvard in 1969.

Pusey first came to Harvard, as an undergraduate from Iowa, in 1924. His favorite professor was Irving Babbitt, the inimitable teacher of French and comparative literature who won fame as the Neohumanist exemplar of the conservative mind. Moreover, it was Babbitt who directed Pusey to the classics. Pusey took his A.B. and Ph.D., both from Harvard, in that field. Pusey was one of those classicists who found it inadequate merely to study the words and actions of the great men of Greece and Rome: the point was to emulate them in a sphere of action in the present day. Pusey also knew that, as scholarship, his dissertation was rather ordinary. He believed himself cut out for, of all things, university administration.

Pusey soon took up a position at Lawrence College in Wisconsin, where he put together a great books program in the humanities. In the Midwest, he discovered a kindred spirit and mentor in Robert Maynard Hutchins, father of the core curriculum at the University of Chicago. Pusey became a missionary for Hutchins's idea of enacting rigorous, bookish, classics-based curricula at Lawrence College. Through the offices of Hutchins, Pusey was installed as president of Lawrence in 1944. In terms of academic reforms, fundraising, and spokesmanship, Pusey's tenure at Lawrence was very successful. In 1953, at the age of 46, he was tapped to succeed James Bryant Conant as president of his alma mater, Harvard.

Pusey's appointment to that elevated post raised eyebrows, to say the least. Faculty members clucked that, although president, Pusey did not possess the scholarly qualifications to be a professor. Nor was he a Northeasterner. Nor did he come from a distinguished family. The Harvard executives who selected Pusey knew they were taking a chance, but they saw two things in him: he could raise money, and he paid attention to his home institution. Pusey's predecessor, Conant, had exasperated the Harvard board in charge of monitoring the university presidency. Brought in in 1933 to help the university get serious after an Abbott Lawrence Lowell administration that at times befitted the Roaring 1920s, Conant had become utterly preoccupied with government work during the Second World War and its aftermath, spending most of his time in Washington. (2)

Here, Harvard was facing a problem a step ahead of other large research universities in the post-World War II period, in that Harvard at an early date had to deal with the prospect of becoming a subsidiary of government. Harvard chose Pusey in 1953 largely because the institution believed it must be vigilant in maintaining its unique identity against the prerogatives of Washington. In contrast, other research universities over the next fifteen years came to see their extensive dealings with government as validation of membership in the establishment. It was only student agitation, first the Free Speech movement at Berkeley in 1964, then the anti-Vietnam War protests, that made administrations re-think the close ties between the university and government. Conservatives, of course, had been vigorously denouncing the standardization of the university mind, precipitated by ties to government, ever since William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale in 1951. That universities took to heart the charges of the student movements of the 1960s, as opposed to the conservative criticisms of the 1950s, was the crucial fact underlying the crisis of confidence that gripped universities at large in the 1970s and beyond.

When Pusey was installed at Harvard in 1953, he knew he had a skeptical faculty on his hands. His first initiative did nothing to win them over. Pusey embarked on a campaign to revivify the moribund and friendless Harvard Divinity School. The university-wide faculty, evolutionist to the core, had enjoyed watching the school slowly die on the vine over the years. The divinity faculty was down to a handful of professors when Pusey took charge. Pusey, a churchgoer, thought that World War II had caught the American intelligentsia flatfooted; impressed by Reinhold Niebuhr, Pusey believed that recent horrors had shown that one must reserve a space for God. Practically, for him, this meant redoubling the endowment and the faculty of the Divinity School. Pusey seems to have won the day by showing that the university could establish ties with new Jewish and Italian money by founding professorships at the school beyond the now traditional realm of skeptical mainline Protestantism. Though Pusey's most famous appointment to the divinity faculty was a world-renowned theologian, Paul Tillich (1886-1965), it must also be noted that the Charles Chauncy Stillman Chair in Catholic Studies was also inaugurated under Pusey's auspices, and the first incumbent of that chair was one of the world's leading historians of religion, Christopher Dawson (1889-1970). (3)